When Music Meets Technology

DataArt airs an interview with Kevin Twitchell, Head of Business Development at its Media & Entertainment Practice. Kevin discusses key changes in the entertainment business, including a move from the ownership to the access model, copyright protection challenges, evolution and expansion of revenue models and the emergence of data as the new king.

“We’ve seen the business go from the physical world where margins were king to download world, and now we are in the streaming environment… So it’s an exciting time now from where … the consumer felt they needed to own the product to now they need access.”

“The music industry is a global industry; it always has been… China is really untapped; for years in the music business you never even talked about China. But the opportunity that could come out of China in relation now to a streaming world is yet to be seen.”

“The most important thing in any entertainment is the copyright, and now in the US, we saw the Music Modernization Act recently passed, which is going to really change the face for a lot of artists, writers, and producers. It also opens up a huge technology challenge for the industry. Same thing over in Europe with the copyright initiative coming out of the European Union and that will also not only impact music, but photos, user-generated content and that will impact on a global level not only the platforms but the content creators.”

“In the old world… the revenue model was pretty limited. It was the CD, the vinyl, and then the download. Right now we’ve moved into a track environment in music - the song. It’s been said by some research that a current track in the global environment has the potential of 400,000 revenue streams… So where we are now is a potential for an artist to make even more money than they ever have before… But it’s going to take technology to bring that to light.”

“In the entertainment business content is always king, and it still is, and it always will be. But in some circles … data has become a new king, as is technology hand in hand with that. If you look at the amounts of data that are coming from the streaming platforms… it’s immense, and being able to work with that data, understand that data is now the most crucial thing in the entire entertainment business. It will lead to new revenue, to exciting new content, artists will have new ways of talking to their consumer, understanding their consumer, so where we really get excited is in data right now and what it can do for entertainment.”